BHU's unsettling projection of reserved teaching jobs under the new UGC formula has been cited by the central government in its Special Leave Petition filed with SC last month.

Some students of Aiyyar hostel reportedly slapped one Neeraj Kumar from Birla hostel. When hostellers from Birla came to know about this, they went to the Aiyyar hostel and both groups got into an argument, police said

Professor Bhatnagar also believed in the importance of nationalism. "There’s nothing greater than one’s place of birth and one’s land. So rashtravaad should be ingrained in us deeply,” he said.

Eyewitnesses said the students first locked and jammed one of the gates of the campus. Later, the situation spiralled out of control when some of them began to break the windows of some cars parked near Sir Sundarlal Hospital on the campus.

The head of department, R P Singh, denied that the questions were out of syllabus. “It is the prerogative of the teacher to set the paper according to his area of specialisation. No teacher sets a paper out of his area of expertise and what he has taught,” he said.

According to the complaint, the “tearing and pulling down the poster" has “caused the Dalit and other minority students deep mental and psychological trauma, leaving them with a deep sense of insecurity on campus”. It alleged that anti-Dalit slurs were hurled at SC/ST students

At BHU, however, the disillusionment set in early. “Only Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali were offered as languages to students of the women’s college while the men at the Faculty of Arts could choose between German, Spanish and Polish,” she says